SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats and is a structured planning method that evaluates those four elements of an organization, project or business venture. A SWOT analysis is a simple, but powerful, framework for leveraging the organization’s strengths, improving weaknesses, minimizing threats, and taking the greatest possible advantage of opportunities.
The SWOT analysis will help you to understand the company’s position which will encourage ideas and decision-making on how to build on strengths, exploit opportunities, minimize weaknesses and protect against threats.
- Identify Core Competencies – It provides a clear view of your core competencies, and allows you to build on them to meet your business objectives.
- Identify Weaknesses – Recognizing your company’s weaknesses is one of the first steps to improving your business. It reveals your weaknesses and provides a chance to reverse them.
- Explore Opportunities – It helps you to explore the opportunities that lie ahead. Using this you can draft your strategic growth plans based on your strengths and weaknesses
- Recognize Potential Treats – It helps you analyze possible threats to your business, and you can subsequently make necessary changes to the business policies and necessary actions. Additionally, it facilitates making supplementary or alternative plans, contingency plans, and so on.
On successful evaluation of SWOT, make and action plan to address the each of four areas.
- Strengths need to be maintained, built upon or leveraged.
- Weaknesses need to be remedied or stopped.
- Opportunities need to be prioritized and optimized.
- Threats need to be countered or minimized.